And regarding my 970, they said it tested fine on there rigs so I have asked for a refund as it would be useless for me. They 'advised' due to the age of my motherboard the pci-e x16 3.0 is a bit funny abou old 2.0 boards.

From a bit of reading, it sounds like to get 3.0 working yeah you need your processor to be 3.0 compatible as well as the card and motherboard - so sounds like a full upgrade to get the best of out of it (or even get it working)

TBH its not worth it, the only reason I upgraded was for Irute to play Dragon Age at full graphics but now she needs to get back to studying so will have little time for gaming. I will upgrade when the new Intel processor is out around the end of the year.

The specification for PCI-E 3.x is fully backwards-compatible with 2.0 and 2.1, however unfortunately the spec isn't always implemented fully/properly by both card manufacturers and motherboard manufacturers, leading to a lot of cases where the backwards compatibility is completely broken